1 June 2020> Happy June, dear Inurnet. Crazy how fast the months are going by, seams it would be the other way around + maybe it is for other folks but for us time is flying by. Din't sleep so well last night, lots of sirens, helicopters + protestors knocking over garbage cans + breaking bottles in our back alley (we live less than a mile from the White House).
     The total # of people dat have died cuz of COVID-19 in the last 6 months equals the # of babies born in 1 day. We need to remind ourselves dat.
     A decade ago we had What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr in our list of books to get but by the time it came out in paperback we were living in Rome + when we got returned stateside a few years later seamed a book like this wd be dated. The other day we found a copy in our liebury boox so figgered what the hell. While there are sum dated refrences to things like MySpace, for the most part it's still relevant. He talks about the humun brain + how it's evolved over the years, from the Greeks to Gutenberg to Marshall McLuhan to now, things weave suspected all along, but Carr backs them up w/ studies + deep insight into the detailed workings of the brain + what exactly is happening as we transition from reading books to surfing Inurnet.
     We never did halve good brain capacity for reading comprehension... weed score high in math + but always scored barely marginull in verbal (tho we was good at spelling). Maybe it's cuz of the hole in our SSES-OS, or the spidery cyst—

[black hole in our brain]

[arachnoid cyst in white]

We never got an MRI before last year so don't know what our brain looked like when we was younger, before Inurnet. Sort of like those commercials in the 80s where they'd show your brain (an egg) + then your brain on drugs (frying pan) + the cooked egg always looked perty tastey so we din't see the point of the commercial. Weed always had our suspicions about Inurnet even tho we ain't bean on social media for at least a decade.
     Speaking of bad brains, our mineareye's d-zzz ain't bin so bad this past month, no vertigo + no so much ringing in our ears, even tho we've bin recording new tunes at high volume in our headphones + speaking of message is the medium, when we recorded music in the '80s on 4-track cassette tape it was a vastly diffrent experience. We're into the convenience of recording digitally + can't believe how easy it is to do insane shit u cd never do on tape... but why then has the quality of music not gone up? What it does is take away the need to rehearse + plan out a song to record it all in 1 take, for better or worse. We use both Logic Pro X + Adobe Audition which have very diffrent approaches, Logic Pro (basically GarageBand) makes it super easy + convenient but u can't really get into actual sound sculpting like u can w/ Audition.
     When we read about Inurnet + the Google Books project it makes us appreciate music a lot more as an art form dat can't be commodofied, like writing + text. Sure, there's Shazam (as far as searchability) + lord nose plenty of musicians halve commodofied themselves, but text + image have been altered dramatically to accomodate SEO + folks like us dat don't give a shit halve become invisible. But Inurnet has allowed us to make our journal indexed + searchable + all in one invisible place in a cloud somewhere to access from anywhere, but it's a walled garden dat onely we know to go looking around in cuz it doesn't show up in search results + no 1 else outside our domain links to us.
     Seams more + more sites are becoming walled gardens guarded by pay-walls, everything monetized.
     Google is both god + the devil. Ditto Amazon. Can't live without them.
     We aint on social media, but still spend more time than we shd online + there ain't nothing good to look at no more it seams, it's all garbage. And we keep our email open even tho we rarely receive anything of importance. Thinking we're gonna check our email + look at news once a day. Computers are powerful tools no doubt about dat (these days mostly just for recording music), but we're gonna spend more time doing stuff like making art from real-world garbage + reading + playing our guitar. And then there's this, the journeling we've been doing our entire life, vital prossesing. Even if never read this again, the act of writing keeps it from going in 1 ear + out the other, as Carr says regarding memary, how u got to do or looking at sumping x2.
     + oh how our writing/thought prosses has changed as we went from writing by hand to computer (skipping typewriters... except the type-written pages in Ark Codex + A Raft Manifest dat we wrote on typewriters to illustrate this very point) + how our journel writing is diffrent when we post on Inurnet, no longer private. More + more tho we're trying to pretend it's private, spend less time editing + self-censoring, cuz it essentially is at this point, who else is crazy to read all this? Even we will probably never go back + re-read this except to refresh our memary.
     Memary is so strange + wonderful when u stop to think about it or read the nitty gritty about how it actually works. We ain't like computers in dat regard, we don't store things in binary bits but more rhizomic synapses. Our memary ain't what it used to be, so much stuff accumulated over the years. Sometimes we see movies weave seen already + there's things we don't remember + most books we red when we was jung we re-reread + it's like we're reading for the 1st time. Watching movies is sumping else we're gonna do less us, just so much crap out there now, series rehashing the same old shit, geared towards just keeping u watching. The Inurnet is good tho for information retrieval, no doubt about dat. No need to clutter yr brain w/ useless knowledge when u can just look it up.
     We program computers, but invetibaly they start to program us. We are programmed by all this crap we read + watch on Inurnet. Inurnet is the new Soma. Speaking of Aldous Huxley, weave also bin reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, another book we found in a liebury boox, probly our one. Spose we shd stop linking out to places like Amazon. The book looks out of print anyway.
     Now it's 7 pm + the helicopters are circling the white house. Another curfew tonight, this time at 7 pm, tho there's still plenty of folks out on the street. It's too tempting to not read the news to find out what's going on. People on social media must be glued even more, those wanting to find out where the action is, either to join or avoid (we're 1s to usually choose the latter).
     Speaking of memary, a few nights ago we was recalling 1 of the few times we've joined such a protest. At the end of a Rock Against Reagan concert at Moscone center where the Democratic National Convention was being held (1984), the Dead Kennedy's finished + Jell-o Biafra (or maybe it was Dave MDC?) said something about a protest outside City Hall so a movement was afoot dat we got swept up in, stopping on the way to fuck up a bank of America (not dat we partook, but our friends did). When we got to City Hall a cop on horseback asked if we wanted to get arrested + if not then kindly step back up onto the sidewalk. It seemed ludicrous to get arrested so we took a step back, but the punker kids we were with all sat down on the ground cuz they wanted to get arrested + we watched them get put into a bus + carted away to spend the night in jail. Mostly we remember cuz we were w/ a girl we can't even remember her name but she was young, a freshman in high school (at a Catholic school called Sacred Heart in Menlo Park, where we'd go pick her up + drive her home (we was a junior, at Mtn View high shcool). She was from El Salvador, cute little punker girl. Don't think we ever even kissed, but we met her mom + would hang out at their house in Woodside. In fact, some times we'd go just hang out w/ her mom alone, a prim + proper El Salvadorean woman who liked us cuz we were better than the other low-life jerks this girl was dating. Anyways, we felt bad cuz we gave her a ride to the city + felt sort of responsible cuz her mom had entrusted her daughter in our hands + we had to go tell her dat her daughter got arrested.
     We mention all this cuz we were tripping out how we have all this stored in our memary, somewhere in the folds of the above brain, what this girl looked like, how she smelled (like bubble gum), what the cop looked like, the color blue, the smell of the horse, etc. even tho this was before we kept a journal + have no record of this, nor a photo of this girl. For all we know this could've bin a dream. The other thing we remember is 1 time after we dropped her off we were driving down a steep hill from her house (way up in the hills) + our car slid out + we did a 360° + came to a stop in the middle of the road. We could of easily gone off the road but we didn't. There was no 1 around to witness it, we were alone. We sat there a moment + then drove off, a bit more careful than we was before.
     Things are deteriorating down by white house. Trump has deployed the military + encourages them to use force. The birds are still chirping on our street + it's a beautiful evening here, a mile away. Seams it's gonna be another long sleepless night.